


Fall Apart Without Me (Body)

by demonsonthemoon



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: (not really but like it's all about those mind/body disconnections), Angst, Character Study, Dissociation, Gen, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 08:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13899849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonsonthemoon/pseuds/demonsonthemoon
Summary: After the last battle, the end of the apocalypse, six survivors contemplate their fate and their own scale.





	Fall Apart Without Me (Body)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago and lost it and never posted it, then I found the file again, did a quick round of editing, and here it is. It's not happy.
> 
> Title and lyrics from the song "Body" by Mother Mother.

**Hermann**

 

 _Take my eyes, take them aside_  
Take my face, and desecrate  
My arms and legs  
They get in the way

 

Hermann Gottlieb lies in an uncomfortable bed with his eyes open. The particular kind of darkness that characterizes a completely sealed room is too good a screen for the projection of memories for him to be comfortable with it. But a dark room is still better than his closed eyelids.

Hermann wonders if insomnia is his new enemy, and what it would take to collapse the structure of his own mind. Probably not much.

Blinking is enough for a silverish blue filter to fall across his vision, for his consciousness to expand to a body that isn't his, that was never his, that could never be his. A body too big, too powerful, a destroyer of world.

Hermann _wants_.

So this is what addiction feels like, the yearning and the emptiness, the utter disgust and the ache. His clarity of mind has become a threat to his sanity as he tries to separate his own sense of self from the mess of mismatched identites leftover from the drift, and then tries to separate himself from his bodily reactions and instincts.

This is not the first time Hermann has cursed his body.

This is not even the first time he has cursed his brain.

But never before have the two teamed up against him like this, tearing him apart until all that is left of him is a burning core of _need_ , doomed to consume itself because the object needed has already been destroyed by everything that Hermann _is_.

Post-apocalypse, Hermann is all destroyed and all destruction, and he lies awake in a bed too small for his body too small for his mind too small for the multitude that is life and death duplicated in the memories of a Hive.

 

**Raleigh**   
  
_And take my hands, they'll understand  
Take my heart, pull it apart_

 

The medical bay looks exactly like the one in Anchorage, and Raleigh cannot stop his hands from shaking. The tremor hasn't stopped since a chopper brought him and Mako back to the Shatterdome, and Raleigh has to admit that he has started to develop a strange fascination for the trembling limbs. He raises his left hand over his head and _watche_ s _._

The doctors have warned him that he is suffering from shock, and also from the effects of oxygen deprivation. He feels calm.

The fact that he cannot control his arms' movements feels comforting. He feels detached from his left arm in a manner that feels familiar and _right_. Eyes fixed on the ceiling, he feels like he is falling.

There is a voice somewhere calling his name, and he wants to run towards it but also away from it, so he keeps falling. He feels like he is missing something, something that the voice has, but does he want it back ? It is painful to be whole. To be whole means you are expected to keep control. All would have been easier if he had just kept falling.

He should have never gotten up, he shouldn't be here, his arm shouldn't be there anymore. He knows the feeling of jaws closing around it and _tearing_.

Has he gotten up ? Is he really here ? Raleigh stares at this hand and feels his muscles ache.

There is a half of himself lost somewhere between two worlds, and he gives it the shape of a Jaeger, but it used to be something else, something soft and silent and warm.

There is a half of himself waiting somewhere for Raleigh to let her in, but Raleigh cannot understand where she would fit, because there is a void inside himself already threatening to drown two halves of him, and he wouldn't dare add a third.

 

**Newt**

  
_And take my brain, or what remains  
And throw it all away_

 

Newt likes to think that he is clairvoyant about the shortcomings of his brain, even though he is clearly not. One time he licked a spurt of dishwashing soap from his fingers just because it was there, and one time he spelled his own name wrong on a thesis report, and one other time he went alone into the streets of Hong Kong in search of a kaiju brain, so really it is no wonder that Newton Geiszler is taken by surprise by how much he does not want to go to sleep.

Except that, rationally, he does want to go to sleep. His whole body is screaming it, muscles aching, bones settling, even his skin feels like a guitar string about to snap. Newt so desperately wants to sleep.

But if he takes his glasses off, the world around him becomes black and blue, he finds himself standing in a kaiju bunker once more, people shouting around him, trying to _leave leave leave_ but Newt is frozen in place and stares at the alien tongue unfurling before him...

Newton Geiszler doesn't take his glasses off. Newton Geiszler sits in his bed, knees drawn up so he can rest his tablet against them. His blanket is wrapped around him up to his armpit as he types. He wishes he hadn't left his laptop in the lab. The sound of his fngers tapping on the touch-screen isn't nearly as satisfying as that of an actual keyboard.

Newt stares at the three bottle of pills on his nightstand.

He wishes he had a typewriter.

He wonders how long it will take him to drop unconscious from exhaustion.

He wonders whether he will dream.

He asks himself if kaiju dream.

 

They do.   
  
**Mako**

 

_Take my lungs, take them and run  
Take my tongue, go have some fun_

 

Mako cannot breathe through her tears. If she cries, she drowns. Drowning is the most common cause of death for a Jaeger pilot. Most of them do not grow old enough to die of anything else.

Mako cannot breathe through her tears, so she pushes her nails into the skin of her palms and clenches her jaw.

There is a shoe on her desk, so Mako stares at her door. She doesn't know whether she is waiting for someone to come in or trying to get out. Her chest feels too tight for her lungs and she still cannot breathe. She thinks that she is not going anywhere, whether she wants it or not.

She could shout, maybe, ask for help. That way someone would come in, and she would get out. She wouldn't need to wait for the answer. But there is no one in the room across from hers and the door is thick.

She has stopped crying and unfurls her hands. Her fingers are tiny. Too thin, too soft, too delicate. Her whole body is like that. She wanted to be a sword. She feels like a needle.

People told her that she saved the world, but she feels distant from this fact. It is like it happened in another life. In that life, she is a hero, she is happy, all her dreams have come true. In this life she is a needle in a time when nobody knows how to sew and she feels empty.

Maybe that is why she cries. Maybe her body is trying to prove that there is still life inside her.

Mako thinks of death by drowning, because she cannot dream what obliteration feels like. She doesn't know what her last thought would be if she went away with a bang instead of a gurgle.

Maybe « I love you too. »

Or maybe « I'm scared. »

Both feel too heavy on her lips to be said out loud.

Maybe obliteration feels like silence.

 

**Tendo**

  
_And take the ears, take them and disappear_

 

There is something incredibly funny about the ceiling of Tendo Choi's room. Or at least he thinks so, to the point where he has to keep an arm over his mouth to muffle his laughter. His head aches so much it has become a drum on which his heart beats. He knows he will have to get up at some point and go to the bathroom to puke. With the amount of alcohol he has consumed, nothing else is possible. He can already feel his stomach upset itself as the laughter strains his muscles. There are tears at the corner of his eyes.

When silence falls again, Tendo feels himself shiver. He isn't cold though. He is scared. He has no idea what he is going to do know. What does the world even look like, outside of this room, outside of the Shatterdome ? He has vague memories, but knows he cannot trust them. Everything has changed.

Is it weird to think that the War has given him everything ?

Perhaps. After all, he too has lost people in this absurd conflict, he too has had his past life shattered by alien invaders. But he has gained so much he almost doesn't remember those things, and that is the scariest thing. What if he loses it all ?

He used to be a nobody. He used to be no one, and to have nothing to fight for. Now he has everything, but no fight. Now he has all this experience of being important, someone that matters, but he can feel it slip from his grasp.

There is something funny to this, and so Tendo laughs, and the echo inside of his ribcage makes him feel like he is on a boat and stuck in a storm. He would like to rip his body apart, take out that laugh and cradle it between his hands until it turns to smoke.

Tendo used to be useful. As head of J-tech, he used to feel indispensible. But tonight he realises that it was all delusion of grandeur, he counts the people he has watched died through colored screens, recalls their last words and their last breaths and how useless he was through them all. He doesn't think he can go back to that state of innocence that made him feel like he mattered.

He doesn't want to get up, because if he gets up it means that life goes on, and if life goes on he has to choose a new path to walk on.

He wonders if he can reach the litter bin next to his desk and puke into that instead.

He closes his eyes.

  
**Herc**

 

 _Take my joints, take them for points_  
Take my teeth, tear through my cheeks  
And take the nose go and dispose  
Oh would you go dispose, just go dispose

 

Max is whining next to him and Herc would reach out to the dog and give him a belly rub, except he knows that it will not be enough today. Nothing will be enough to calm the animal, it seems. In a way, Herc is pleased by this fact and how his own pain is exteriorised in the dog's moans, so that he doesn't have to do it himself. He has never known how to talk. Usually, he lets his actions speak for themselves, but suddenly his body feels old, unreliable. He has a fractured arm, but what he mostly feels are the fading bruises all over his skin, bruises from all the times he's been tossed around inside of Striker Eureka, and Lucky Seven before that, all the bruises that never got the time to heal, because there wasn't any time.

This is the weight he has accumulated over the years, the weight he has taken on his shoulders willingly, and it suddenly feels like it's crushing him.

It probably has something to do with the fact that he is now carrying it alone.

He has lost his family, has lost his best friend, has lost the last people who remembered him as a young dad with small dreams and big hands. All he has left is a dog crying for his own wounds.

That is not true, of course. It is not true, and it is not fair. There is still a whole band of people alive to whom he means something, or has meant something, or will mean something. There is a whole world out there that needs to be re-build, and Herc could be part of that. Should be part of that. He knows this is what everyone would have wanted for him.

But he is so tired. His whole body aches with the pain he has spent years ignoring.

He thinks of giving up the fight, and feels disgusted with himself. This isn't him. He always said he would go down fighting, or not at all. Or at least he told others so.

Herc realises that if there is something he can do, it is to become as good a person as the ones he lost thought he was. This is something he could do for them.

Maybe.

He feels an ocean away from who he once was. Oh, sure, he knows how to swim, but he is scared that his body might have forgotten, and that trying would just mean floating away from this shell of his, leaving it all behind.

Max is still whining at the end of the bed, and Herc finds himself scratching him behind the ears and whispering meaningless words of comfort. There is no one to hear them but himself.

 


End file.
